Historically Inevitable?

HISTORICALLY INEVITABLE? TURNING POINTS OF THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION Edited by TONY BRENTON PROFILE BOOKS Historically Inevitable.indd 3 28/04/2016 13:26 First published in Great Britain in 2016 by PROFILE BOOKS LTD 3 Holford Yard Bevin Way London wc1x 9hd www.profilebooks.com Text copyright © Profile Books Ltd, 2016 Selection copyright © Tony Brenton, 2016 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, St Ives plc Typeset in Arno by MacGuru Ltd The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 78125 021 1 eISBN 978 1 84765 859 3 Historically Inevitable.indd 4 28/04/2016 13:26 CONTENTS A Note to the Reader ix Chronology x Acknowledgements xvii Map xviii Introduction Tony Brenton 1 1 1900–1920 Foreign intervention: The long view Dominic Lieven 11 2 September 1911 The assassination of Stolypin Simon Dixon 29 3 June 1914 Grigory Rasputin and the outbreak of the First World War Douglas Smith 48 4 March 1917 The last Tsar Donald Crawford 66 5 April–July 1917 Enter Lenin Sean McMeekin 91 6 August 1917 The Kornilov affair: A tragedy of errors Richard Pipes 109 7 October 1917 The ‘harmless drunk’: Lenin and the October insurrection Orlando Figes 123 Historically Inevitable.indd 7 28/04/2016 13:26 8 January 1918 The short life and early death of Russian democracy: The Duma and the Constituent Assembly Tony Brenton 142 9 July 1918 Rescuing the Tsar and his family Edvard Radzinsky 163 10 August 1918 Fanny Kaplan’s attempt to kill Lenin Martin Sixsmith 178 11 November 1918 Sea change in the Civil War Evan Mawdsley 200 12 March 1920 The fate of the Soviet countryside Erik C. Landis 218 13 February 1922 The ‘Bolshevik Reformation’ Catriona Kelly 244 14 1917–22 The rise of Leninism: The death of political pluralism in the post-revolutionary Bolshevik party Richard Sakwa 262 Afterword Lenin and yesterday’s utopia Tony Brenton 284 Notes 302 Dramatis Personae 331 Contributors 337 Index 339 Historically Inevitable.indd 8 28/04/2016 13:26 INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION Tony Brenton I We are approaching the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. If one had to pick the single event which has most shaped twentieth- century history, and so our world in the early years of the twenty-first, this must be it. The Revolution put in power the totalitarian commu- nism that eventually ruled one third of the human race, stimulated the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, and thus the Second World War, and created the great antagonist the West faced for the forty years Cold War balance of terror. It is hard to think of another example where the events of a few years, concentrated in one country, and mostly in one city, have had such vast historical consequences. The events of 1917 have themselves become a historical battlefield. For seventy years it was a core Soviet belief that the revolution was the triumphant product of ineluctable historical forces. That view may now look quaint but, in a softer version, it has held extensive sway among Western historians. In this view tsarism was rotten and doomed, social- ism, even Bolshevism, offered Russia a bright new future, and it was Stalin who corrupted the dream. Others have taken a much less sym- pathetic standpoint. They argue that there was a liberal alternative to tsarism, which the Bolsheviks strangled at birth, that it was Lenin who created the dictatorship and the terror, and that Stalin was no more than his apt pupil. And there are lots of other variants. In one, tsarism was on the way to modernising Russia, and liberalism would inevitably have followed had the revolution not stopped it in its tracks. In another, Russia’s whole historic tradition is of state-dominated tyranny, and the regime made by Lenin just the latest manifestation. · 1 · Historically Inevitable.indd 1 28/04/2016 13:26 · INTRODUCTION · Where you come out on all these grand questions depends heavily on how you view what happened in Russia in the years surrounding 1917. Could things have gone differently? Were there moments when a single decision taken another way, a random accident, a shot going straight instead of crooked (or vice versa) could have altered the whole course of Russian, and so European, and world, history? This book picks out those moments in the history of the revolution where that feeling of contingency is particularly intense. These are the forks in the road where one senses that there genuinely was a question over which way things would go. For each of these moments a distinguished historian has been invited to describe the background, significance and consequences of the event as it happened, and also to speculate a little as to how things might have gone otherwise. This is not a full narrative history of the revolution (there are plenty of excel- lent ones already) but rather a series of snapshots that catch a very tangled series of events at key moments and ask whether the story might have been radically different. II Before presenting our snapshots it may be helpful to put them in context. The revolution did not come out of the blue. The problems of a backward-looking autocracy struggling to navigate a period of rapid social and economic change were not unique to Russia. They have produced revolutions before, notably in France in 1789 (an example constantly on the minds of the Russian revolutionaries). In Russia’s case, the dress rehearsal for the events of 1917 took place in 1905. The year 1904 had seen a ‘perfect storm’: military defeat by the Japanese; impoverishment and discontent in the countryside; appalling living and working conditions in the cities; and the spread of socialist and democratic ideas (often in an extremely virulent form) among the intel- ligentsia. These came together on ‘Bloody Sunday’ (9 January 1905) when the Imperial Guard in St Petersburg gunned down hundreds of · 2 · Historically Inevitable.indd 2 28/04/2016 13:26 · INTRODUCTION · unarmed demonstrators. The result was a mortal blow to the credibility of Nicholas II and his regime. Massive nationwide strikes and demonstrations forced the tsar to accept the first-ever representative assembly in Russian history, the Duma. This concession brought a few years of precarious stability. In our first snapshot, Dominic Lieven looks at how things might have gone if the 1905 revolution had turned into full-scale social collapse, as it in fact did twelve years later. The next few years saw a bitter tug of war between a Tsar who (encouraged by his uncompromising wife and their resident ‘holy man’, Rasputin) was intent on maintaining his autocratic power, and a series of Dumas (regularly disbanded and reconstituted by Nicholas in what he hoped would be a more helpful way) demanding economic and political reform. The one statesman of the period who showed any capacity to master these conflicting forces was Pyotr Stolypin, prime minister 1906–11. Stolypin was an ‘authoritarian moderniser’ – admired in particular by Vladimir Putin – who tried to use the Tsar’s authority to bring about the economic reforms which Russia so badly needed. These efforts ended with Stolypin’s assassination in 1911. Simon Dixon in his chapter looks at Stolypin’s impact, and asks how events might have evolved if he had not gone to the Kiev opera that night. With the abandonment of serious efforts at reform, the one thing that temporarily allayed rising social disorder and discontent was Rus- sia’s entry into the First World War in 1914. As so often happened (and, indeed, still does today), Russian society pulled together in the face of a common enemy. Strikes stopped, agitators were jailed, there were huge patriotic demonstrations. But in the longer term the war, which brought military humiliation and rising economic dislocation, was the final nail in the coffin of the tsarist regime. Douglas Smith looks at the little-known role of Rasputin in talking Nicholas out of entering an earlier Balkan war, and his efforts to dissuade him in 1914 as well. Not only Russia but the world too would be a very different place if he had succeeded. He of course didn’t. The war took Nicholas far away from Petrograd (the new, patriotic, name of St Petersburg) to command his troops. · 3 · Historically Inevitable.indd 3 28/04/2016 13:26 · INTRODUCTION · Government was left in the capricious and incompetent hands of the empress Alexandra and Rasputin, about whom all sorts of scandalous rumours circulated. The standing of the Tsar reached rock bottom; even members of his family were plotting to remove him. Rising popular discontent came to a head with bread riots in Petrograd in February 1917. After some attempts at suppression the army joined the rioters. Nicholas’s attempt from his distant headquarters to send in relief forces failed. His generals now advised him that the only way to save the dynasty, and Russia, was for him to abdicate in favour of his son Alexis. Concerned about Alexis’ health, Nicholas tried instead to pass the crown to his brother, Michael. But Michael was unacceptable to the civilian politicians in Petrograd who, as the Provisional Govern- ment, were to inherit real power.

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